Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

phenomena. Two China researchers who work from the premise that supernatural healings do not occur[249] complain about superstitious healing claims rife in rural districts.[250] They do note that healing claims are abundant[251] and that they heard several healing claims in a house church in Shanghai.[252] But they emphasize that the nephew of one of their informants noted that the women there “loved repeating such stories, which according to him were just gossip, always unverifiable.”[253] Working from an antisupernaturalist framework, the authors do not count as gossip itself the nephew’s testimony that he regards his aunt’s stories as gossip, and they seem to use this verdict to discredit all healing testimonies. Yet however one chooses to explain them, many stories from China cannot be simply gossip; they derive from persons directly affected by them.